babble is rabble.ca's discussion board but it's much more than that: it's an online community for folks who just won't shut up. It's a place to tell each other — and the world — what's up with our work and campaigns.

On the other hand, I don't think it is actual party policy that white people are better candidates. I am glad that fool spoke his mind on the issue, though.

Those gaffes also speak to the party's inexperience, and Danielle Smith wasn't hiding anything when she made the decision that it was okay for them to say what they wanted, and not point out they were discriminatory.

Plus, there is only so much you can hide. There are some issues which Harper claims he will not touch, but anyone who knows him realizes he is just waiting until he is in a position to act.

He doesn't have a supreme court in his pocket, which is what I think he would want before opening an issue like abortion choice.

Plus, he says he will not re-open it, but that only applies to criminalizing it in Canada. So far as support for women's health overseas, he is going full-steam ahead with his social conservative agenda. For that matter, he has slashed and eliminated funding to women's groups within Canada.

Likewise his office of religious freedom, stacked with right wingers. In short, I think he cares very much about social conservative issues. He only restrains himself in areas in which he thinks he is vulnerable.

So Harper is trying to deny his support for some things, with limited success.

But as I said, I think Smith's response was far more telling than anything any of her canidates said; she screwed this one up all by herself.

I'd like to see the relationship between the number of people on the voters list and the voting age population. Still, it's quite an improvement. People must have been motivated to vote for some reason. Be nice to know the turnout by riding to see if accessibilty to a polling station is still a problem as it was last election. Also 10% of 57% is better than 8% of 42% (if I remember the percentages correctly).

(from thread #4) If every vote counted equally, PC voters would have elected 40 of the 87 MLAs, Wildrose 30. Liberal voters would have elected eight MLAs, NDP voters eight, and Alberta Party voters one.

If every vote counted equally, there would also be less strategic voting and higher turnout, so I think the seat distribution would be a little more in favor of NDP and Liberals. How many NDP voters in NDP strongholds didn't bother voting because they had confidence their party was going to win?

Quote:

University of Alberta political scientist Lori Thorlakson said a 16-percentage-point increase in turnout is an impressive surge in the span of a single election. You have to look several decades back into Canadian electoral history to find a comparable increase in voter turnout, she said. "Turnout rates tend to climb slowly, but plummet quickly," Thorlakson said. "We don't generally see it shooting up."

Not all surges are the same. Surely, a surge in turnout from 41% to 57% would not be as difficult as surging from, say, 70% to 86%.

Quote:

While the percentage of Albertans who voted wasn't high, the huge population increase the province has experienced over the last decade meant that the total number of voters broke a record

Most significantly, 25 corporations hedged their bets, giving cash to both parties, most prominently, companies in the petrochemical and energy industries. For Cenovus, Enbridge, Encana, Marathon Oil, North West Upgrading, NOVA Chemicals, Penn West Petroleum, Suncor Energy, Transalta and TransCanada Pipelines - there was a certain indifference. Smith or Redford would do. Either of them would be a good bet to allow the expansion of tar sands production into the foreseeable future.

If every vote counted equally, there would also be less strategic voting and higher turnout, so I think the seat distribution would be a little more in favor of NDP and Liberals. How many NDP voters in NDP strongholds didn't bother voting because they had confidence their party was going to win?

Would PR also have likely (re-)elected extremists like Ted Morton because they would have been placed so high on party lists (as a top cabinet minister)?

I'm sure any PR model in Alberta would either follow the Law Commission model (vote for a regional party list or for one candidate on the list), or the no-list "best runners-up" model.

Under "best runners-up" look at the PC vote in the 13 southern Alberta ridings: 38.2%, or five seats. So PC voters elect two regional MLAs who did not win this year: that would be new candidate John Barlow in Highwood (42.5%, damn good against Danielle Smith herself) and Minister of Agriculture Evan Berger, MLA for Livingstone-Macleod (41.5%), former reeve of Willow Creek. Six other defeated candidates in that region got a higher % than Ted Morton's 35.3%. Not too popular locally after all?

Under regional open list, who would have won top spots at the regional nominations? (Or top spots after Greg Weadick.) Evan Burger and Ted Morton? Quite possibly. But when Southern Alberta voters cast a vote for the regional list or for one candidate on the list, would Ted Morton have ended up still one of the top two? Not guaranteed, eh?

I agree that it might be jumping the gun to blame the pollsters, who may very well have been issuing accurate reports. Part of the blame might go the media, for subjecting those reports to superficial analysis, which failed to take into account factors like the high number of undecideds.

Plus, as the article says, the full effect of the "bozo eruptions" wasn't apparent until the final poll, which for legal reasons was not published until after the election.

After all her braying about Mulcair's position on the tar sands, she is running for the hills, and is going to disappear to the USA, while he is on his visit to Alberta.

Not a very impressive display of Western hospitality, to say the least.

Ignorance has no bounds it seems.

Redford is also doing Albertans a future disfavour, because should he become prime minister one day, she is not making it easy to represent Albertans with the federal government. Fortunately Mulcair is above these of silly games, and sees her for what she is, a representative for the oil companies and corporate Alberta.